david@gorm.ruc.dk (David Stodolsky) (05/24/91)
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: >Once and for all: under no circumstances, none whatsoever, is C News ever >going to report problems to a remote site via mail. There is simply no >way of making sure that more-or-less innocent people won't get inundated >with immense volumes of costly mail. People who make suggestions along >those lines can forget it; they have not thought the problem through; >we have. We aren't going to do it. The subject is closed. Yes, but the problem remains. There are several related problems both of a technical and social type. (I am responding to this because it was crossposted to comp.groupware - actually it was some earlier articles in the thread). Even if C News did report problems by email, it would not solve a situation in which postings were not propagating, but appeared normally on the posting host. This happened to me last year. The defect was undiscovered for two months at a large site! I have also seen posts that propogate, but only in a limited way. The question is not whether C News is broken. The net is broken, to some degree, all the time. Technical problems will not be fixed unless people find out about them. The person who most wants to find out whether a post is propagating is the author. Is there a way to close the loop so an author knows if articles are propagated, and more important read? Lets say, we creat a newsgroup called news.feedback (this is not really the best name). When a news reading program encounters an article it generateds a record like: :Article-ID Action. For example: 282FD655.3D2A@tct.com Kill. If the person reads the header or the article, additional fields can be added. The record might look like this: 282FD655.3D2A@tct.com Read Agree At the completion of the news reading session the software posts the records showing actions and reactions to articles encountered in news.feedback. These posts would be in a highly compressed form, not intended for human consumption directly. It can be argued that this would generate too much traffic, but plenty of traffic is already generated by people saying, "Yes, I agree." A compressed response like the above would generate about the same level of traffic. This doesnot suggest that an independently operating program generates traffic. The user must invoke the newsreading software before anything happens. There are reasons to think that overall traffic would be reduced. Quality would be improved if it was done right. Are there any obvious defects with this idea? -- David S. Stodolsky Messages: + 45 46 75 77 11 x 24 41 Department of Computer Science Tel: + 45 31 95 92 82 Bldg. 20.1, Roskilde University Center Internet: david@ruc.dk Post Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark Fax: + 45 46 75 74 01
ian@airs.com (Ian Lance Taylor) (05/26/91)
david@gorm.ruc.dk (David Stodolsky) writes: >[Plan for using news.feedback to see whether an article is propagated] >At the completion of the news reading session the software posts the records >showing actions and reactions to articles encountered in news.feedback. >These posts would be in a highly compressed form, not intended for human >consumption directly. This is a little ambiguous. Do you mean to post reactions to EVERY article in EVERY newsgroup to news.feedback, or do you mean to post reactions to articles in news.feedback to news.feedback (somehow avoiding the effect of positive, ah, feedback)? The former seems rather drastically unworkable. The latter, while interesting, isn't that much different from posting to misc.test (assuming, as I have seen claimed, that people actually do have auto-reply daemons set up for misc.test; I don't have such a setup at AIRS). This approach still wouldn't tell you how well your article was propagated, unless the propagation was really dismal or unless you have a really good grasp of what nodes are on Usenet. You could check for specific machines, but how could you tell whether, say, 10% of the machines were not represented? -- Ian Taylor ian@airs.com uunet!airs!ian First person to identify this quote wins a free e-mail message: ``Nobody believed him, so out of politeness to his listeners he pretended to be joking.''